The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  2

  Mother and I lug the trunk across the wide expanse of lawn at the rear of the academy to Stanley Avenue. While we wait for the electric trolley, I inspect the string of small blisters forming where the trunk handle bit into my skin and wonder how we will manage the half mile between the trolley’s final stop and our house, atop a bluff overlooking the Niagara Gorge and River Road.

  As the trolley approaches, we take up our positions at either end of the trunk and stoop to grasp the handles. But then a young man, four or five years older than I am, gets off the trolley and says, “Let me give you a hand,” and I remember seeing him a few weekends ago, during one of Loretto’s Saturday outings along the Niagara River.

  The outing had begun as always, a sister out in front, a tail of paired-off girls trailing behind. The man from the trolley was out walking, too, though in the direction opposite ours. With so few chances to glimpse the local boys, unless of course it was a visiting brother in the academy parlor on a Sunday afternoon, we girls poked one another, chins nudging in his direction. I was struck by the size of him, his shoulders, his height. When the gap between us had closed to a dozen yards, it occurred to me that he would likely enlist, as had 150,000 other volunteers, and be sent overseas. Like now, he was wearing the matching waistcoat and jacket, neckcloth, and flat cap of the working class, though he carried himself well. His hair hung a little long, with a few locks the color of wheat reaching beyond his ears. His skin was bronzed, suggesting he spent a great deal of time outdoors. His eyes were like the Niagara River: green, full of vigor, captivatingly so. He was handsome, but not at all in an aristocratic way. There was nothing to suggest an easy life, or time spent primping and preening. I wanted to speak to him, badly, to say something consoling or maybe hopeful, something to give him courage or peace. It struck me that he might not survive the war, that it would be momentously wrong of me to look away. I said, “Good day,” as we passed, causing my classmates to stir, and he tipped his cap.

  Afterward I peered around each corner, between each pair of buildings, hoping to catch sight of him. But all I saw was the war, cropping up everywhere, like never before. I would glance toward a pair of surge tanks belonging to one of the power companies and see the barbed-wire barricades guarding them from the enemy, the saboteurs thought to be living in our midst. My attention would drift to a lamppost, to a poster pasted there, an illustration of a little girl with blond ringlets, standing knock-kneed, speaking the words “Oh please do! Daddy. Buy me a victory bond.” a On the next lamppost there would be another, this time a soldier pulling on the jacket of a uniform, beginning to turn, to rush away, laughing out the words “Come on. Let’s finish the job.”

  All of it had come as a great shock. At the academy it had been easy to forget that Britain, and thus Canada, was at war. Little had changed, other than music practice being shifted to afternoon study hall. In the evening the practice rooms of the music corridor, along with most of the academy, remained in darkness. In an effort to save electricity for the factories producing trench shovels, wound dressings, munitions, and the like, we gathered with our schoolbooks in the library and remained there until lights out.

  As always, our procession paused at the falls, and I looked into the water of the upper river, at the round stones of the riverbed, each large enough to resist being torn from its resting place and flung over the brink. Clear water hurtled past the stones, then shattered to white as it plunged to the river below. Standing there at the brink of the falls, I asked for a young man to be spared, a young man for me.

  From across the trolley aisle, I sneak glimpses, careful not to give Mother reason to watch. Eventually my gaze meets his, and we both quickly look away. After that I keep my eyes forward and do my best to appear contemplative and elegant, though I have been sweating since I first picked up the trunk. Even as I trail my fingertips along my collarbone, as I have seen Isabel do, I know that I am absurd, that he will forever disappear at the next stop or the one after that, that Loretto girls are reserved for men of a different lot. And, honestly, would not my time be better spent thinking about Father’s situation or Isabel’s broken heart?

  When we reach the end of the trolley line, he stands, and I notice what appears to be bedding rolled up and held together with a length of rope. As I sort through rationales for the bedroll—a delivery, a purchase, likely a camping trip—I focus on the facts. His jacket is pressed, his face clean-shaven, his general tidiness not at all like that of a tramp. “Can I help?” he says to Mother, indicating the trunk.

  I notice his use of can when may is correct and wonder whether Mother will point out the error, but she only says, “Thank you,” and steps aside.

  “I’ll take your bedroll,” I say.

  He hands it to me. “Where to?” he asks, lifting the trunk from the trolley and effortlessly swinging it onto his shoulder. Introductions have not been made, and I wonder if it is out of deference to Mother, who has not offered her hand.

  “Glenview,” Mother says. “But don’t go out of your way.”

  “I’m heading to the whirlpool.”

  “You’re camping?” I ask.

  He nods, and we set off along River Road, walking three abreast.

  “It’s late to be setting up camp,” I say.

  “I already have a spot pretty much set up, a cave in the gorge wall. I’ve camped there since I was a kid, with my grandfather at first.”

  As he walks he holds his head in a way that makes it seem he is listening to the river. His intensity is such that to speak would be to interrupt. “It’s worked up tonight,” he says.

  “What is?” I ask, though I am almost sure I know what he meant.

  “The river. The wind’s from the west.”

  “I could see the river from my window at the academy.”

  Too polite to do more than hint, Mother clears her throat.

  He smiles, his eyes straight ahead, reflecting pinpricks of moonlight. “I’ve heard the nuns keep a vigil there, that there’s always one of them praying.”

  Years ago Archbishop Lynch purchased the land on which the academy stands and deeded it to the Loretto community of nuns. He had seen a picture of the falls as a boy and thought it would make an idyllic place to adore the Creator of heaven and earth. The notion of the mist above the plunge pool shepherding prayers along to God stayed with him through the years, and soon enough a sister or one of the girls was always in the academy chapel, folded hands tucked beneath her chin. What better way to honor the archbishop’s vision than a continual stream of prayer? Every girl at Loretto knows this bit of history, this lore behind the most sacred of the academy’s traditions. “Perpetual adoration,” I say.

  “It’s true then, the nuns believe the mist floats their prayers up to heaven?”

  “I’ve seen what look like bits of silver hovering above the falls,” I say.

  He nods, seeming to give careful consideration to my flecks, and then says, “Some people can’t see much beyond the ends of their noses.”

  “I’ve seen bubbles where the colors are brighter.”

  “Honestly, Bess,” Mother says.

  “I’d like to see that,” he says, quietly enough to rule out defiance, loudly enough to let me know he is on my side.

  A ways farther on, I make out Glenview, with its square front section facing the river and its rectangular rear. It stands atop the bluff without a single light lit. But even in darkness, Glenview is grand. The front façade is arranged symmetrically, with two ground-floor bay windows and a projecting central bay capped by a gable pediment. The builder had not skimped, and Mother likes to recite the evidence—the raised quoins of each corner, the hood moldings over each window and door, the keystones cut from single pieces of rock.

  “You’re lucky, living in Silvertown,” he says, “so close to the river.”

  Mother would be unhappy to hear it said we live in Silvertown, though it is true. Surrounding our house on land subdivided long since the days when it w
as farmed, a neighborhood commonly called Silvertown houses the workers of the International Silver Company, a stone’s throw away.

  The presence of the silver factory is likely the reason Father was able to afford Glenview, though I doubt that when Mother agreed she had anticipated the number of workers who would opt to live so close by or the extent to which the polishers, grinders, and burnishers on the payroll would have names like Lococo and Petrullo and Cupolo.

  At Glenview he sets my trunk on the veranda and whisks away the hand Mother holds out offering him several coins. He tips his cap to Mother and then to me. I hold my breath, thinking of what I might say other than “Thank you,” which I have already said twice.

  In the entrance hall I count to ten and say, “He forgot his bedroll.” Then I set off across the yard without giving Mother a chance to intervene.

  “Your bedroll,” I say, when I have nearly caught up.

  “I’ll be needing it,” he says, without seeming surprised to find me on his heels.

  “It’s a warm enough evening.”

  “It’ll cool off in a bit.”

  I want to change the conversation from the weather, which is a sure sign there is nothing to say. “I suppose the ground can get pretty hard.”

  “Yep.” He nudges the packed dirt at the side of the road with the toe of his boot.

  I want to ask his name, but the courage with which I set out after him has deserted me. “Well, then,” I say and pause awkwardly before saying, “Good night.”

  “Good night,” he says back.

  Before I have a chance to contemplate our parting, he is walking away from me, toward the river.

  In the same four-poster bed I have slept in since I was a child, I am unable to sleep. I do my best to focus on the walk from the trolley stop, and am able to conjure an image of him rolling the stiffness from his shoulder after he set down my trunk. Still, other less pleasant details elbow their way into my thoughts: No maid opened the door and ushered Mother and me inside before hurrying off to fetch tea. The coverlet of my bed was not turned down. Far worse, no father clapped me on the back, welcoming me home. No sister flung her arms around my neck. Last year Isabel made meringue cookies for my homecoming and we laughed our heads off, I with strands of the cotton batting she had stuffed inside each cookie stuck between my teeth.

  Though I am home, in Father’s house, and he would not approve, I creep out of bed and lift my rosary from a corner of my trunk, where it is hidden beneath my underclothes. He likes to remind me that I am a Methodist, despite more than a decade of attending Mass each morning. What he does not know is that I sometimes joined the other girls in taking the Blessed Sacrament, that I have kept a rosary deep in my pocket for a half dozen years and sometimes bless myself with the sign of the cross.

  Fingers sliding from crucifix to beads, I race through the Apostles’ Creed, an Our Father, three Hail Marys, and a Glory Be. I linger on the fifth bead and pray in earnest.

  O Father, forgive me, my family, our sins. Save us from the misery and poverty that I do not think we know how to bear. We are in need of your mercy, all of us. I am afraid. Amen.

  Then I sleep.

  The Reporter, April 7, 1848

  NEWCOMER RESCUES MEN FROM RIVERBED

  There is a newcomer in town, Fergus Cole, and at least a dozen men owe their lives to him. He came from the Ottawa Valley logging camps, arriving a week ago, March 30, the date plenty of folks are calling the day the falls stood still. It was a curious sight that met him—the cliff face of Niagara’s famous cataract with so little water going over it that he was able to walk a good ways out onto the riverbed. Half the town was out there, in the mud, milling around, some with logging carts recovering lost timbers, others digging up relics from the War of 1812.

  By nightfall the crowd had thinned and Mr. Cole got it in his head that the river was only blocked at its mouth by jammed-up ice. “I remembered the wind changing directions a day earlier, all of a sudden gusting hard from the west,” he said. Though he claims he is not much of a geographer, he knew enough to recall that Lake Erie fed the river and that its axis ran east–west. He decided that thawing ice had accumulated in the middle of the lake, that when the wind shifted the entire flotilla of ice was blown into the mouth of the river all at once, becoming lodged. “I knew the dam wouldn’t last, not with the pounding wind,” he said. He warned as many people as would listen, and some left the riverbed. “When I felt the earth tremble beneath my feet, I started yelling and scooping up folks and pushing the ones I couldn’t carry toward shore.” According to several onlookers, he was kicked and insulted, even threatened with a bayonet. James Stephens, a straggler dragged from the riverbed just moments before the Niagara came hurtling down the channel like a tidal wave, said, “He grabbed me by the collar and hollered in my face, ‘Can’t you hear the river coming back?’ I tried to shake loose. Not a single one of us could hear the low rumble Fergus Cole could.”

  Mr. Cole waves away any suggestion of his arrival putting him off. “That river’s something special,” he said. “I’ll be setting down roots.”

  3

  At Loretto breakfast consisted of oatmeal or farina, and toast. All the meals at Glenview had been prepared by Bride, our Irish cook. If there was oatmeal, it was served with figs and strawberries, and always a second dish: codfish, creamed or in cakes; eggs poached with spinach; fruit turnovers; pineapple flan. The dining room table was set with linen, and Hilde, the housemaid, poured tea and told me to eat up so she could get on with closing the bedroom windows and making up the aired beds.

  This morning a basket, covered with a cloth, sits on the dining room table midway between the plates at the spots where Father and I usually sit. I lift a corner of the cloth and find biscuits beneath. I head for the kitchen, thinking there might be a pot of tea warming on the range.

  Mother turns toward me from the sink, where her arms had been buried elbow deep in suds. “Good morning,” she says.

  “Where’s Father?”

  “He’ll be down in a minute.”

  “And Isabel?”

  “She takes her breakfast in bed.” She looks thoughtful for a moment and then throws her palms upward as though she were at her wits’ end. “She hardly eats a thing, only biscuits and only because I threatened her with Dr. Galveston coming again.”

  “Dr. Galveston’s been to the house?”

  “She’s used to having things her own way, and, well, life at Glenview has changed. I’ve had to let Bride and Hilde go.” She hesitates a moment, wiping her hands dry, watching me. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she finally says. “Dr. Galveston says Isabel needs rest and sunshine, but mostly she needs to think positive thoughts. And I haven’t spent as much time with her as I should. I’m sewing frocks again.”

  “A dressmaker?” Though Mother is a whiz with needle and thread, a skill picked up way back when Father was only a clerk, it is difficult to imagine her bent over a sewing machine rather than ambling about the garden with Hilde in tow, carrying a handful of freshly cut peonies.

  “I’ve made seven dresses and have orders for nine more. Mrs. Atwell convinced me I could earn a decent wage, and then she ordered the first three.”

  Mrs. Atwell is Kit’s mother, and though I have known her for years, I cannot recall ever having seen her in anything that was not a good decade out of date.

  “The dresses really are marvels compared to her usual frocks,” Mother says. “And every time she gets a compliment she hands out one of the cards she insisted on having printed up with ‘Margaret Heath, Dressmaker’ and my telephone number. Mrs. Coulson gave me my next couple of orders.”

  Mr. Coulson had been a favored underling of Father’s at the Niagara Power Company, and Father often said how clever and diligent and loyal Mr. Coulson was, which to my mind did little to offset the fact that he was pockmarked and stout, to use the polite word, and very nearly bald though he was ten years Father’s junior. Father had hired him as a clerk, promoted him t
o floor manager and then to director of operations.

  Mrs. Coulson, with her long neck, full bosom, and extraordinary height, is possibly the most daunting woman I know. Isabel and I were always a little awestruck when she came to the house, and then delighted to be sent upstairs with one of her coats. Though she never hesitated to scold children who were not her own, we would bury our faces and fingers in plush velvet, shearling trim, rosewater-scented mink, and then, once we had worked up the nerve, slip the garment over our own paltry frames and admire the transformation in the wardrobe mirror. “She’s the last woman on earth to need another dress,” I say.

  “Mr. Coulson was appointed company director after your father was let go, and I suppose they think it’s the least they can do.”

  “We’re taking charity, then?”

  Mother’s lips become a thin line, her gaze lingering until my hand flits to a stray lock of hair. “I’ve been busy and Isabel’s been alone too much,” she says, “but that’s where you come in.”

  “Should I go up now?”

  “After breakfast you can take her a tray, just a biscuit and some tea.” She glances at the clock. “What on earth is keeping your father?”

  From the lower landing she calls up the stairs, and a few minutes later Father comes into the kitchen in the frock coat and starched collar of a working gentleman. “Bess,” he says, clapping me on the back. “At last, you return.”

  The frock coat and cheerful greeting give me hope that some good news has come his way. But the business day began at least an hour ago, and he moves through the kitchen as though he has all the time in the world. “Yes,” I say. “I’m finally home.”

  “And the festivities last night, how’d it all turn out?”

  “The dining hall was beautiful, knee deep in roses and peonies,” Mother says.